So that’s the real reason why Warcraft Adventures never hit the shelves: the game design by the 3rd party developer was shit, so was the code, and Blizzard tried to fix it by locking the franchise’s creator, a celebrated adventure game legend, and this Kern dude in a conference room for a week, then took one look at the code and went, “Ah, fuck it.”

7 thoughts on “Warcraft Adventures leaked; designer spills beans”

I call BS on “not Blizzard’s design”. Blizzard approved the script. Blizzard approved character design. Blizzard received intermediate builds on schedule. They could’ve course corrected at any time they wanted. And I would not call in game scripts “code”. Truth is Blizzard dropped the ball on this one and they waited to the last moment to decide that main quest and puzzles needed redesign. Cost of doing additional animations and voiceovers was much bigger issue then the scripts could ever be. So I would not take an opinion of somebody who wasn’t even involved in the project as gospel.

I was actually talking about Mark Kern and his non involvement in the project. When did he even join Blizzard?
There is no need to look for alternative explanations. Bill Roper outlined real reasons quite accurately: cost of finishing game in both money and time made it a money loosing proposition, so canceling it was a practical choice.
PS. Did some googling for Mark Kern and it looks like he prefers to express his opinions in a rather forceful way…
And the game doesn’t even have 300 screens 😉

Well, yes, I looked up Mark Kern as well, and he does have some rather … questionable attitudes in general. That said, I have no reason to not trust that what he’s saying about being part of its cancellation with Bill Roper. If someone else from Blizzard would step forward and contradict what Mark has said, then I will of course amend what I have said in this post.